Days ahead of the UK’s May 7 local elections, where both Reform UK and the Green Party are projecting major gains, the right-wing populist party has sparked national outrage with a controversial pledge that weaponizes migration policy for partisan gain.
Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, has already made clamping down on unauthorized migration a core campaign promise, previously committing to deport 600,000 people residing in the UK illegally and construct a network of new detention facilities with capacity for up to 24,000 detainees. In a provocative announcement Sunday, Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf laid out explicit partisan criteria for where these facilities will — and will not — be located.
Yusuf confirmed that no detention centres would be sited in any parliamentary constituency represented by a Reform UK MP, nor in local councils controlled by the party. “Of the remaining areas, we will prioritise Green-controlled parliamentary constituencies and Green-controlled councils to locate the detention centres,” he said. Yusuf framed the policy in blunt electoral terms: “Put simply, if you vote in a Reform council or Reform MP, we guarantee you won’t have a detention centre near you. If you vote Green, there’s a good chance you will.”
Yusuf justified the policy by pointing to an internal Green Party policy document that states the party “wants to see a world without borders,” arguing the partisan siting was a fitting consequence of the Greens’ open-borders stance. To pre-empt expected legal challenges to the plan, Yusuf added that a Reform UK government would push through new legislation to block courts from halting construction, mandating that facilities be built in Green-leaning areas regardless of legal pushback. He framed the upcoming local elections as a fundamental clash for the UK’s future, claiming “the failed era of the Tory-Labour uniparty is over” and that the 7 May votes are “a battle for the soul of Britain between Reform and the Greens.”
The pledge has drawn fierce condemnation from across the political spectrum, starting with the Green Party. A senior Green Party source told Middle East Eye that the policy is “reminiscent” of the racist 1960s campaigning by the Conservative Party, specifically calling out parallels to the 1964 election campaign of Conservative politician Peter Griffiths. Griffiths infamously distributed racist flyers in the Smethwick constituency urging voters: “If you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour.” The source also dismissed Farage as a desperate “establishment stooge” whose credibility is eroding among his own base.
Criticism has also extended to figures on the British right, who have rejected the policy as an unacceptable abuse of state power. Fraser Nelson, a conservative columnist for The Times, described the pledge as a “new departure for UK politics” that rejects the longstanding principle of a prime minister governing for all citizens, in favor of an overtly partisan approach to state policy.
Simon Clarke, director of centre-right think tank UK Onward, called the proposal “abhorrent.” Clarke noted that the policy explicitly targets sites for detention centres as political punishment for communities that do not support Reform UK — a penalty that would not only apply to Green voters, but to supporters of the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour as well. He added that the plan would “almost certainly be deemed an abuse of ministerial power for political purposes, and as such would likely be struck down in court before ever being implemented, wasting millions for the taxpayer without detaining anyone.”